Technologies are often presented and perceived as being inevitable, natural and necessary, as if they were the products of some inner logic. As a result, there has been a tendency in the past to focus on the effect or impact a technology has on society at the expense of investigating the origin of the technology. More recently, efforts have been made to penetrate the ‘black box’ of the technological artifact in order to reveal the variety of ways technologies are shaped. This paper will discuss the economic, political and other social factors which shaped the Australian Animal Health Laboratory and which determined its proposed functions.